On March 25^th, 2009 the FBI reported that it broke up one of the country’s largest auto identity theft rings, and that a new national database may soon make that crime more difficult. But wait – auto identity theft? Aren’t identity thieves after people’s identities, not cars’? The answer is that they want both. In reality, stealing a car’s identity is a subset of identity theft targeting people. It’s a way to make stolen cars hard to trace by doctoring them with false information.

Also called car cloning, auto identity theft occurs when car thieves steal a legitimate VIN plate from one car and transplants it on another. The stolen plate is often taken across state lines and/or attached to the product of a chop shop. The deception is often topped of with fake ownership papers, stolen license plates and even relocation into a third state. Even if police uncover the fakes information it can be difficult to ever track down the thieves or original owner.

Like many other identity fraud cases, the perpetrator doesn’t concentrate on creating an ironclad fake so much as doing just enough to make a profit and disappear. This means that in many cases, if you’ve been duped into buying a cloned car the fraud will last just long enough for the thief to get away. Soon after that, the police catch up and seize the car – or they put you on the hook for traffic tickets and other problems linked to the stolen VIN.

It’s difficult to prevent car cloning using normal identity theft prevention methods. Authorities warn of the following signs that a car has a stolen VIN number:

• The vehicle is a bargain that is literally too good to be true.
• You get traffic tickets that aren’t in your name.
• There are scratched on or around the VIN plate.
• There are misspellings or other irregularities in the ownership papers.
• There are gaps in the vehicle history report.